Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Brooks Davis]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 09:24:38PM +0100, Nicolas Rachinsky wrote:
> * Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net> [2004-01-11 11:02 -0800]:
> > If you could make this work such that you just stuffed GENERIC and the
> > mfsroot onto however many floppies it takes, I think that would almost
> > certaintly solve re's problems with floppies (i.e. if all they had to do
> > when the kernel/mfsroot got too big was to bump a NUMFLOPPIES
> > variable.)  Sure that would suck for the floppy users, but that would
> > put the pain in the place where it's most likely to cause someone to
> > come up with some better.
> > 
> > Now, who wants to give this a try?
> 
> OK, I tried now the following:
> 
> I made copies of the 4.9 RELEASE Floppies, split the half of the
> kernel and mfsroot to another floppy and added two appropriate
> splitfiles.
> 
> Afterwards booting from these four disks worked fine.
> 
> disk1:
> /boot > /kernel.gz.split
> /kernel.gzaa
> 
> "Message from libstand"
> 
> disk2:
> /kernel.gzab
> 
> "Message from loader.rc"
> 
> disk3:
> /mfsroot.gz.split
> /mfsroot.gzaa
> 
> "Message from libstand"
> 
> disk4:
> /mfsroot.gzab
> 
> 
> I don't know the release build process, so I don't know how much
> effort is neccessary to create such floppies, but the loader seems to
> have all features needed to use such disks.

It sounds like this is definatly a viable option.  Now someone needs to
see about hacking something like this into the release makefiles.

-- Brooks

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